the joys of renovating...

It's Friday. I'm sitting at my dining table with Leila sitting next to me; she's eating lunch and watching Dora while 2 men are behind me working in my kitchen. Many men have been in our kitchen lately and this visit wasn't planned. It's pretty much 3 weeks to the day since we tore out our kitchen. I thought we'd be out 2 weeks instead of 3 but things don't always go as planned.

Our countertops were installed on Wednesday (instead of Monday) and they look beautiful (minus a few hiccups). I'm absolutely in love with our kitchen, I'm just dying to use it! Yesterday, I was able to start the fun stuff...I vacuumed every cupboard and wiped them down with clorox wipes to get them ready to be filled. We needed to wait 12 hours to use the sink that was just installed so we planned on installing the dishwasher/faucet/disposal yesterday. Like I've mentioned, Eric is handy and planned on doing it himself...but it didn't go as easy as we thought.

We had troubles with the pipes connecting to the disposal. After a late night run to Lowes, we still couldn't figure it out so Eric called a plumber first thing this morning to do what we thought was a simple job. Well, it's turned out to be more complicated than we thought, I won't go into details but it's a headache, and headaches always cost $$$...so do old homes. We're pretty much out of $$$ for the renovation so the house decorating and back splash will come later...much later. Oh, the problems you inherit when you buy a house.

Yes, I understand everything you are telling me. Look at all the holes in my new cabinet!

I'm so happy with our kitchen, but it hasn't been the smoothest process. Can you believe the headache we'd be in if we did it ourselves? No thanks! I'm so over men being in our kitchen and cars being in our driveway. And the kitchen I cleaned out yesterday is full of dust again. I'm not complaining, I just want to remember the next time we buy a house (we're never moving after all we've been through now) that a home/kitchen renovation is HARD! I love that we've been able to add our touch to our home, and I don't think the next home we buy will be new, we'll probably still want to customize our next home and go through this all over again. It really isn't that bad, it just feels lame in moment. It'll be so worth it in the end and we won't even remember it!

I'm just starting to stress out about the kitchen because we're on a time crunch now. My parents are arriving in town tomorrow from California to stay with us for a week  (they're moving to Utah in the summer and my dad is going to start looking for jobs). My Tia Meri and her grandchildren (my cousins kids) came to visit my parents from Mexico for 2 weeks so they'll be coming along too. I love my Tia Meri and Johan and Nadja and am so so excited to see everyone and have them stay in our new home, I just hope our house will be in order by tomorrow (with a functioning sink and dishwasher). Our basement is still a mess too...I'll get around to that later tonight.

But for now I think Leila and I will go for a walk around the block, we can't go too far.

in with the new

The Artisan installers arrived bright and early last Tuesday morning. Bryan and Juan got to work right away. Leila and I hung around for a bit but we tried to get out of their hair, as our house isn't very big and their stuff was every where. Luckily, the weather was nice so we were out and about trying not to be home. 

Did I ever mention how hard it is to be out of a kitchen with a toddler? I think washing dishes out of the tub is disgusting. So we've been using paper and plastic everything. I'm so looking forward to 1. not having to use the bathroom sink for everything and 2. making a home cooked meal. It will be a dream cooking in our new kitchen.

Day one:

 

This was our kitchen at the end of day 1. The plumbing was an issue and got in the way of the placement of the dishwasher because it stuck out so far. Artisan had to hire a plumber to re-position the plumbing but fortunately, Artisan took care of the bill since they didn't realize it was a problem when designing the kitchen. Now we have some copper from our old pipes to go cash in. 

Day two:

At the end of day two it actually looks like a kitchen. I'm in love so far...and it's only going to get better.

Day three:

Bryan stopped by for a couple hours on Monday to finish installing the second open shelf box and the flip-down tray under the sink (to keep the sink area tidy). 

Since our kitchen is so small, we decided to optimize the space by adding the tip-down tray and message center. These cupboards were in our kitchen design from Lowes and we thought they were so cool we had Artisan custom make them for our kitchen even though IKEA doesn't. It wasn't a problem for them at all and they whipped 'em out. The message center is a place for our keys, mail, etc. I hope it will replace our junk drawer...or make our junk drawer less cluttered. I'm so looking forward to using these cupboards on the daily!

We had an existing outlet behind the cabinet next to the fridge, now it's the perfect spot to store our toaster and keep it off the counter.

Our kitchen is almost complete and we're LOVING it so far. I love how the open wood shelf boxes break up the white cabinets. On Monday we'll have our countertops! No more eating out/off of paper plates.

out with the old

Here's a reminder of what we did to the house before we moved in:

• tore down a wall
• replaced the floors in the kitchen
• sanded/statined the rest of the hardwood floors throughout the house
• got rid of all the popcorn ceiling/drop down ceiling
• re-textured the ceiling
• added can lighting
• removed all the wallpaper in the bedrooms
• painted almost every nook and crany in the house
• tore down the upper kitchen cabinets and painted them white
• sanded and painted the hideous wood paneling

Eric and I wanted to move in when the house was "complete" but we quickly learned that the house will never be perfect, it's a constant work in progress. We know what we want to do in each room of the house and I wish we could just afford to do it all at once. But I'm pretty sure we'll appreciate it more as we do each room in time.

Though the kitchen was only half a kitchen, we finally decided to move in at the end of December (much later than we'd hoped). People usually consider the kitchen to be the heart of the home and in our home it's been the eyesore of our home! We've only been able to unload some of the kitchen boxes due to the lack of storage. This is the kitchen we've been living with since we moved in:

The time has finally come for us to get rid of this eyesore. Istallation of our new kitchen started last Tuesday and Wednesday so to prep for that, we had a demo party the Saturday before. Eric gathered his buddies, Ray and Trevor, to come over and let out some aggression (if they had any).

Before:

During:

After:

Goodbye old kitchen, we're not sad to see you go.

finalizations

After finalizing the design of our kitchen, it was time to pay for it. Since everything "kitchen" is 20% off, we picked up a few other things to organize the drawers and buckets for garbage, recycling, and compost (our house came with a huge compost bin that's nicely hidden in our backyard so we thought we better get a bucket specifically for compost otherwise we'll never use it). You only get one 20% off coupon so we took advantage.

Eric and Katshia are comparing the list from Artisan to IKEA's, making sure everything matches and is correct. I'm so glad we had Artisan design and install our kitchen, with IKEA you can only customize things to a certain extent. But Artisan knows how work with IKEA's product and customized things to fit specifically for our kitchen. I didn't think we'd need any customization's in our kitchen and didn't want anything custom because that usually means more money. But we have a funky area by the door that needed a custom cabinet and we also wanted custom open shelf boxes. Surprisingly, neither of these custom built items cost us very much at all. Artisan knows that we chose IKEA because of the quality and price. So they that into consideration with all of their customers and made things work with our budget. They were a dream to work with. 

Before we paid, there was one last thing we needed to take care of....the countertops. We were still unsure of the color we wanted for the countertop. 

 

From the beginning, we knew the exact cabinets and handles we wanted. We didn't create a design board for our kitchen but we looked at hundreds of pictures on Pinterest and Houzz so the design board was in our head. Eric and I have almost the exact same taste so between our mental design board, the selection that IKEA offers, and Artisan, designing the kitchen was a breeze.

Choosing the color for the countertop was the hardest part of this whole process. We've always dreamed of having quartz countertops (with little or no speckles or pattern) so we just needed to narrow it down to color. It's especially hard to decide when: 

1. you have a vision of the color you want but they don't have it 

2. when you have a budget you want to keep and the countertops you want aren't in that budget. 

At first, we didn't love the colors of the selection at IKEA so we picked a different one from the showroom at Aspen Countertops (the same place that supplies IKEA with their countertops) but at the last minute (before we paid) we decided it wasn't the right color. So we decided to choose IKEA's selection instead.

I'd love an all white kitchen with white or marble looking countertops. White walls/kitchens are really in right now and I'm seeing it everywhere on Pinterest. But since the layout in our home is so open with the living, dining and kitchen all in one room, I don't want the space to feel lopsided with all white on one side and color on the other. I think that having a crisp, all-white space on one side of the room will make the living space feel more dirty/cluttered. The kitchen needs contrast so we narrowed it down to two colors: sterling on the left and pewter on the right.

I loved pewter because it's gray and not too dark or heavy. But it has a brown undertone and when put next to the color of our walls, it looked brown. But when put next to something else it looked gray. I didn't know what a whole slab would look like and I didn't want to take the chance of it looking brown. We don't want an ounce of brown (except for wood) in our kitchen so we went with sterling on the left. At first I thought it was a little dark, but now I love, love the color and think it'll mesh nicely with our furniture and wall color.

The kitchen staff at IKEA is very knowledgeable, and they always say anyone can help you with your kitchen, it doesn't have to be the same salesperson. But you get attached to the person who helped you the first time and understands your situation so luckily Katshia was always there when we went and helped us with every step of the way. Overall, a great experience. And I feel like the customer service at IKEA and Artisan was much better than Lowes. 

Before we left IKEA, we needed to stop by the delivery section to drop off our paperwork and tell them Artisan was going to pick up our order. She pointed to a stack of boxes and said it was already picked out and ready to be picked up for tomorrow. All those boxes (minus the chairs which aren't ours) is our kitchen. Wow, they work fast. Those are a lot of boxes and again, so glad we don't have to sort it all and having missing or extra pieces. Believe us, we've heard stories of it takes weeks to a month for someone to install their own IKEA kitchen. Artisan even comes out and has to re-do or finish kitchens that people have already started. The extra cost of installation will be worth every penny.